Category: Sculpture & Installations

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Darla Jackson creates intriguing sculptures of animals such as rabbits, birds, snakes, and mice, using them to explore human emotions. I am struck by the contrast of black and white in her pieces, the enigmatic nature of the surreal depictions of the animals, and also by the poignant sadness of some of them, the impression they convey of being victimized, abused, and harrowed.

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Tabaimo’s immersive, haunting video installations delve into the complex contemporary psyche, exploring themes of isolation, anxiety, and malaise. Surreal and a little unnerving, lovely and delicate and nightmarish, they are evocative of traditional Japanese woodblock prints and combine hand-drawing with computer animation. An exhibition of Tabaimo’s works is currently at the Seattle Asian Art Museum.

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Amsterdam-based artist Danny van Ryswyk currently has a solo exhibition at Roq la Rue in Seattle, Tender Loving Darkness, featuring sculptures first created digitally in a 3D program, then rendered by a 3D printer and refined and hand-painted by the artist, and finally housed in vintage bell jars.

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Sougwen Chung’s extremely beautiful and intricate abstract works explore the interaction between man-made and machine-made, and are determined by intuitive and logarithmic processes, as well as by the play between control and chaos. They have an incredible sense of movement and fluidity.

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Jessica Dalva’s show Hapax Legomena is exhibiting at La Luz de Jesus Gallery in LA now through May 31st. I love the unearthly beauty of these figures with their milky opaque eyes, haunting expressions, and intensely eloquent bodies, posed within their black frames.

“The term ‘Hapax Legomena’ is used to describe words that only appear once in a text or language, often rendering them untranslatable. Each piece in this series revolves around an individual word, a facet, a unique expression of a part of the complex variety of personal battles we fight….The show focuses on one’s relationship with oneself, internal wars, and the entanglements of love. The sculptures are a navigation through fears, moments of clarity and joy, and nightmares.”

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Joaquin Jara creates eerie, unsettling installations wherein he selects a natural location to place a “human simulation,” and observes the interaction between it and the environment, and the stages by which it is disintegrated, ravaged, adorned, and transformed into an otherworldly effigy.

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One of the most bizarre relics from bygone days of anatomical understanding is the Anatomical Venus. Endowed with a startlingly lifelike appearance, full-size, and lovingly detailed, these wax models, popular through the 18th and 19th centuries, represented idealized beauties with body parts and organs that could be revealed and removed in a layer-by-layer dissection. Made with real hair, sometimes real eyelashes, glass eyes, bedecked with pearls, they were meant to enlighten the public on the anatomy of the animal “made in God’s image,” in a way that would be accessible and aesthetically pleasing.

With her strange, alluring, languid beauty, the Venus exudes a morbid eroticism that is simultaneously repulsive and fascinating, and so disturbing to the modern eye. Her far-off gaze seems to bespeak religious ecstasy, perhaps bordering on martyrdom (I imagine it as her sacrifice to our viewing/invasion of her interior spaces), as much as death and sensuality. I look at her, and I can’t help but to feel sorry for her, so exposed and vulnerable in her display case, her glass coffin lined with silk and velvet, eternally disassembled for our education and delectation. I feel as though as I am looking at her last thoughts as she’s dying upon her sumptuous bed, and there is an inherent, latent cruelty or brutality in the voyeuristic quality of this gaze. I can never know the nature of what she is thinking, I can only witness her dissected and intruded-upon body, transfixed in an unwitting, helpless macabre striptease. There is something both obscene and divine about this exquisite lost art form that was as much aesthetic marvel as scientific aid.